American Food Trivia
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This American food trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the dishes the United States invented, adopted or argued about: the burger's four rival birthplaces, the Buffalo bar that fried the first wings, the Philadelphia hot dog stand that switched to steak, the salad created in Mexico for thirsty Prohibition-era Americans, and the canned meat Hawaii buys seven million tins of a year. It runs through regional classics (barbecue styles, Cincinnati chili, po' boys, Hot Browns, clam chowder), snack-aisle icons (Oreos, Twinkies, Cracker Jack, tater tots), holiday food (Thanksgiving turkey and the casserole from a soup company test kitchen), and Chinese-American and Tex-Mex dishes with surprising origins. Easy questions sit next to genuinely hard ones, and each shows its difficulty. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation, so the origin stories here are the documented ones, not the ones on the diner placemat.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Buffalo wings were first fried up in 1964 at which Buffalo, New York bar?
Anchor Bar
Teressa Bellissimo, who ran the Anchor Bar with her husband Frank, is credited with first tossing the wings in hot sauce and butter in 1964.
Q 02What did Pat and Harry Olivieri sell from their stand before inventing the Philly cheesesteak?
Hot dogs
The brothers sold hot dogs from a South Philadelphia cart in 1930 when Pat grilled chopped beef on a roll instead; a cab driver tasted it, asked for one, and the sandwich was born.
Q 03The Caesar salad, a fixture of American menus, was actually created on July 4, 1924 in which city?
Tijuana
Italian immigrant Caesar Cardini ran a restaurant in Tijuana serving Americans dodging Prohibition; his daughter Rosa insisted the original had Worcestershire sauce but no anchovies.
Q 04Which company introduced Spam on July 5, 1937?
Hormel
Hormel Foods of Austin, Minnesota, launched Spam in 1937 as a canned pork shoulder and ham product; the company runs a Spam Museum in its hometown.
Q 05Which US state has the highest per-capita consumption of Spam, at around seven million cans a year?
Hawaii
Hawaii's Spam musubi, a slice of the meat on rice wrapped in nori, is a local staple; the taste dates to World War II, when Spam fed GIs stationed across the islands.
Q 06In which country did Ignacio Anaya invent nachos in 1943 for US military wives from Fort Duncan?
Mexico
Anaya improvised the dish at the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, Mexico, just across the border from Fort Duncan, frying tortilla triangles with cheese and pickled jalapeños.
Q 07Deep-dish pizza was invented in 1943 at which Windy City restaurant?
Pizzeria Uno
Pizzeria Uno's founders Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo get the credit, though their chef Rudy Malnati Sr. may deserve it; the cheese goes under the chunky tomato sauce.
Q 08White Castle, credited as the first fast-food hamburger chain, opened in 1921 in which city?
Wichita, Kansas
Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson opened the first White Castle in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921 with $700, selling square sliders for five cents apiece.
Q 09Fortune cookies most likely originated with immigrants to America from which country?
Japan
Claimants include Makoto Hagiwara of San Francisco's Japanese Tea Garden and David Jung of Los Angeles. When the biggest US maker tried selling them in China in 1992 they were rejected as too American.
Q 10Which dessert did Florida designate its official state pie in 2006?
Key lime pie
Key lime pie is pale yellow, not green, because ripe Key limes are yellow; a 1965 bill to fine anyone advertising a version made without Key limes failed.
Q 11The banana split was created in 1904 by a 23-year-old pharmacy apprentice in which Pennsylvania town?
Latrobe
David 'Doc' Strickler built the first one at Tassel Pharmacy in Latrobe; Wilmington, Ohio disputes the claim, but the National Ice Cream Retailers Association sided with Latrobe in 2004.
Q 12Per the Omaha origin story, the Reuben sandwich was invented for a poker game at which establishment?
Blackstone Hotel
Grocer Reuben Kulakofsky reportedly created it for his weekly poker game at the Blackstone Hotel in the 1920s, and owner Charles Schimmel put it on the hotel menu; New York's Arnold Reuben has a rival claim.
Q 13The Cobb salad is named after the owner of which Hollywood restaurant?
The Brown Derby
Q 21Which Cincinnati chili chain did Greek immigrant Nicholas Lambrinides found in 1949?
Skyline Chili
Skyline Chili takes its name from the view of downtown Cincinnati from its first restaurant in Price Hill, opened by Nicholas Lambrinides in 1949.
Q 22Which US president served 'a pie called macaroni' at a state dinner in 1802?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson's enslaved chef James Hemings trained in France and may have brought the recipe back; Kraft's boxed version arrived in 1937 promising a meal for four in nine minutes.
Q 23Which country buys nearly a quarter of the Kraft macaroni and cheese sold worldwide?
Canada
Robert Howard Cobb, owner of the Brown Derby, supposedly threw it together from kitchen leftovers late one night in 1937, and it went on the menu chopped in neat rows.
Q 14Roughly how many hot dogs do Americans eat each year?
20 billion
The estimate is 20 billion a year, about 7 billion of them between Memorial Day and Labor Day; Charles Feltman began selling sausages from a Coney Island cart in 1867.
Q 15Which condiment is famously never put on a Chicago-style hot dog 'dragged through the garden'?
Ketchup
Ketchup is the banned one: the proper dog gets mustard, tomatoes, onions, sport peppers, bright green relish, a pickle spear and celery salt on a poppy-seed bun.
Q 16North of the US border, corn dogs are commonly known by which brand name?
Pogo
Pogo is the brand name corn dogs go by north of the border, where the word doubles as the generic term; in the US, Cozy Dog Drive-In in Springfield, Illinois claims the first on a stick in 1946.
Q 17Which frozen-food company created Tater Tots in 1953 to use up leftover slivers of cut potato?
Ore-Ida
Ore-Ida founders Nephi and Golden Grigg found the name in a thesaurus; in Minnesota the tots go on top of a ground-beef casserole known as hotdish.
Q 18Which state's pork barbecue splits between a vinegar-pepper sauce east and tomato-tinged 'dip' west?
North Carolina
North Carolina's eastern style is whole hog with vinegar and pepper; the Piedmont's Lexington style adds a little tomato to the dip and favors pork shoulder, and both sides agree it is all pork.
Q 19Which barbecue city is best known for pork ribs served either 'wet' or 'dry'?
Memphis
Memphis ribs come dry, with a spice rub and no sauce, or wet, basted before and after cooking; Charlie Vergos' Rendezvous made the dry style famous.
Q 20In Cincinnati's famous parlors, what does ordering a 'three-way' get you?
Spaghetti, chili and cheese
A three-way is spaghetti, chili and cheese, in that order from the bottom up; add onions or beans for a four-way, both for a five-way, a system the Macedonian-born Kiradjieff brothers began in 1922.
In Canada it is called Kraft Dinner, or simply KD, and Canadians eat it at roughly half again the American per-capita rate, which is why it is half-jokingly called the national dish.
Q 24Green bean casserole was created in 1955 in whose corporate test kitchen?
Campbell Soup
Dorcas Reilly created it in the Campbell Soup test kitchen in Camden, New Jersey, and donated the original recipe card to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002.
Q 25Since 1989, what traditionally happens to the turkey presented to the president each November?
It is given a mock pardon
It is given a mock pardon, a ritual George H.W. Bush formalised in 1989; the pardoned birds go to live out their usually short natural lives at a farm or university.
Q 26What flavour was the original Twinkie filling when James Dewar invented the snack cake in 1930?
Banana cream
Dewar's original was banana cream; a wartime banana shortage forced the switch to vanilla that stuck. The name came from a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes.
Q 27The Oreo, launched by Nabisco in 1912, was an imitation of which earlier cream-filled sandwich cookie?
Hydrox
Hydrox, made by Sunshine from 1908, came first but lost the shelf-space war to the Oreo; Double Stuf arrived in 1974.
Q 28Cracker Jack was first shown to the public at a world's fair in which city in 1893?
Chicago
Brothers Frederick and Louis Rueckheim sold the popcorn-peanut-molasses mix at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; the Cracker Jack name came in 1896.
Q 29In what year did Cracker Jack start putting a prize in every box?
1912
Prizes went into every box from 1912; physical toys gave way to digital game codes in 2016, long after 'Take Me Out to the Ball Game' (1908) immortalised the snack.
Q 30Which style of clam chowder is made with a clear broth, containing no milk, butter or tomatoes?
Rhode Island
Rhode Island's clear chowder keeps the broth unthickened, unlike the cream-based Boston style or Manhattan's red tomato version; all usually come with oyster crackers.